History

HIGH-FLYING HEROES & COSMIC CREEPS

If you like your extra-terrestrials along the lines of E.T., Alf and Mork, then the Power Lords might not be for you. They also aren’t like many of the aliens on the original Star Trek, who were basically humans with painted faces and perhaps some added antennae. One of the best things about the Power Lords is that most of them aren’t very humanoid which, if you really think about it, is what aliens from vastly different parts of the universe should look like.

Another cool thing about playing with the Power Lords was that there was no TV show out there to constrain or limit your imagination. The cardback bios provided some clues as to the Aliens’ origins, powers, and weaponry but only the broad outlines of the story were there, inviting you to create your own epic adventures. Better yet, some of the aliens were unaffiliated so they could be a bad guy one day and good guy the next, providing for endless possibilities.

Adam Power, the main protagonist, looked normal at first, but with the touch of a button and a simple spring-loaded twist of the waist, he would change from a goofy looking guy with bad hair into Lord Power, a blue monstrosity with a flat triangular nose, a red jewel embedded in his forehead and thick red veins that rippled on the outside, instead of the inside, of his skin.

And due to the nature of his action feature, when you looked at his figure from the side, the fused Adam / Lord Power character looked like a pair of multi-hued, conjoined twins with two faces that were growing out of the back of each other’s heads. If that wasn’t strange enough, to make the quick-change action feature work, Adam also had six fingers (including two opposable thumbs) on each hand.

Then there was the beautiful Shaya, Adam’s feminine humanoid counterpart. She shared an action feature similar to Adam’s, but her transformation was even more startling. On one side she looked like your regular, run-of-the-mill, three-eyed alien gal, but her other half looked like its skin had been flayed off so what was left was a bunch of exposed muscle tissue topped by a single, huge eyeball.

The last of the line’s three heroes was Sydot the Supreme, who looked like the unholy offspring of a T-Rex and a Salamander. He wore a space suit, had long tendril-like fingers, suckers on his palms and an action feature that allowed his tongue to flicker up and down between his odd squared-off teeth.